Who among us has opted not to cook or bake something because the ingredients aren’t at hand? I am especially guilty of this, mainly because I wait until I want to eat something before I decide to cook. Leave the apartment? Go shopping?* No, I want something to eat NOW. On the up side, this forces me to be creative, and tests my understanding of the way ingredients work (science!) on a pretty regular basis. Here’s an example from yesterday. I was catching up on my blog reading, and found this delightful post about olive oil cake from The Hungry Dog.

Olive oil cake is one of those things I’ve always wanted to try, and this recipe sounded pretty great. Until I started looking at the ingredients, and making mental substitutions: “Let’s see, I don’t have blood oranges, but I do have a jar of sour cherries I should use, maybe I could substitute those. Oh, wait, you need the juice, too, and I think the syrup the cherries are in will be too sweet. It would be easy to go get some oranges, but wait, it’s Monday and the fruit stand on the corner is closed. Besides, it’s sleeting…”

So I started casting around for another olive oil cake recipe. My cookbook collection was surprisingly silent on the subject. I found a couple more recipes online, but they wanted me to separate the eggs and whip the whites and fold them in and it all sounded like kind of a hassle. But it occurred to me at some point that the olive oil is simply playing the role of the fat in a regular cake recipe. And I started to wonder if I could make an olive oil pound cake (quatre quarts in French) with a straight up 1:1:1:1 ratio of eggs, sugar, oil, and flour. So I preheated my oven to 180C, weighed my eggs and got to it.**

My three eggs weighed in at 200 grams, so I scaled out 200 grams each of granulated sugar, cake flour, and extra virgin olive oil (pretty good stuff, but not the very best) in separate containers, and I drained that jar of sour cherries, which gave me about 2 cups of fruit, weighing about 350 grams. I wanted some insurance that the cake would rise, so I added a teaspoon of baking powder to the flour, along with 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Eyeballing the ingredients on the counter, I guessed that this cake was going to fit best in my 10″ tube pan, so I oiled it and dusted it with flour.

Mise en place done, I started whipping the eggs in my second biggest bowl with my new hand mixer (I didn’t want to buy it, but now that I have it, I’m really glad I did), adding the sugar as I whipped. I kept whipping the eggs and sugar until they lightened in color and got thick and creamy looking. (In some circles, we call this the “ribbon stage”, where drizzling the whipped eggs over themselves results in a thick ribbon that remains distinct for at least three seconds before melting back into the whole.) Whipping the whole time, I slowly drizzled in the olive oil and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. I thought it looked like airy mayonnaise, which it basically was, and all of a sudden those cakes made with mayonnaise made more sense and sounded less disgusting. Finally, I sifted the cake flour, baking powder, and salt together over the batter and folded them in with a rubber spatula until the batter was smooth.

I spread about half of this in the tube pan, sprinkled about two-thirds of the cherries over it, and topped with the remaining half of the batter and the rest of the cherries. At this point, I thought it might be nice to put some pistachios on top for crunch and because they’re so good with cherries. So I grabbed a handful of shelled pistachios and scattered them over the cake. And a sprinkling of cassonade for added sparkle. After 45 minutes in the oven, the cake was a lovely golden brown, springy to the touch, and a toothpick stuck in the center came out clean. I let it cool a bit and dug in.

The cherries had sunk to the bottom, as I feared they might, but the cake is still marvelous. The crumb is velvety-fine and tender, with just a hint of crunch on top from the pistachios and cassonade. The olive oil lends a subtle, earthy fruitiness, and the sour cherries offer bright bursts of juicy flavor. It was as great for dessert as it was for breakfast, and makes a fine snack as well. Interestingly, the flavors seemed to solidify overnight, so the olive oil notes are more pronounced the next day.

I’m kind of in love with this cake. Only problem is, now I’m out of olive oil and sour cherries. I suppose a trip to the store will be in order soon…

*In Paris, this can be a serious time commitment. It’s rarely the case that you can just pop out really quick and grab that one ingredient you’re missing, because even though the shop downstairs always has the kind of flour you’re looking for, the one time you really need it fast, they’re out. So you walk to the next store, probably a few blocks away. They don’t even carry what you need. And it goes on like that, until you finally find the flour, but in the meantime you’ve thought of a bunch of other things you need, and then you call home to make sure you’re not forgetting anything, load up your shopping bag and lug it home. By then any energy you had for cooking is sapped, so you scrap the whole idea and decide to try again tomorrow.

**I weighed the eggs first because they are the least flexible of the ingredients – I can weigh out any amount of flour, sugar, or olive oil I wish, but if I arbitrarily decide I want to use, say 150 grams of each, and then my eggs weigh 60 grams each, well, it’s not going to work so well. Weighing the eggs first means I can just scale everything else to match their weight.

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As you may or may not remember, this blog was essentially on hiatus for most of 2012. It made me sad to miss celebrating the fourth birthday of Croque-Camille, but work came first. Now I have a little more time again, so I’m here to right old wrongs and have a proper fourth birthday party! And fifth. Because here we are, five years after I started writing here, five years and a few weeks after I moved to Paris, five years and a few days after my own thirtieth birthday, three apartments and two jobs later, and I still love it. So here goes: a month-by-month recap of the last two years. When we last left off, it was…

February 2011: There was plenty of exploring, both in town and in the country, and I also started my gig at Girls’ Guide to Paris, where I wrote the recipe of the month for a little over a year.

March 2011: The trip to Budapest was great, and the opening of Candelaria changed the face of Mexican food in Paris, but most of my time was spent looking for yet another new apartment.

April 2011: We did eventually find that apartment (the one we’re in now, and so happy we didn’t have to move last year) and moved in. I also managed to draw up a post outlining what I think makes a successful fruit salad. I need to make that kiwi salad again – I have a lot of kiwis right now.

May 2011: I bid farewell to my old neighborhood, still a lively and bustling street that seems to be sprouting new trendy restaurants every week these days. I also got to spend the day with Katia and Kyliemac, chatting and eating pastries for their podcast.

June 2011: I puzzled over potential career moves (and despite how it all turned out, I don’t think I made the wrong decision) and took a break in St. Malo, eating cheese and kouign amann.

July 2011: Indian cooking, a newfound obsession with vegetable and grain salads, a glorious trip to the Languedoc, and chocolate and candies from Fouquet.

August 2011: The month started with a tour of my new/current kitchen and ended with a delightful meal at Au Passage. (Incidentally, we ate at chef James Henry’s new restaurant, Bones, for my birthday, and loved it.) In between there was Chinese, Mexican, Indian, and Italian eating, and the Four Pounds of Cheese project, where I tried to reduce food waste, and mostly succeeded.

October 2011: I gave notice at work and announced my new (now former) job as executive pastry chef at Blend. Speaking of blends, I wrote what I like to think is a helpful post about making your own spice blends.

December 2012: I put the smack down on the “macaron”, and develop some recipes for the McCormick Flavor Forecast. My friends are still talking about these caramel sage bars.

January 2013: And I started the Paris Pastry Crawl (which I realize I haven’t touched yet for February, but there’s still time). I didn’t mean to rag on Laurent Duchêne quite so much, but I thought it was a valuable lesson, and helpful to show you, my dear readers, what can go wrong when making an éclair.

A huge thank you to all of my readers, past and present, who have kept me going for five (!!!) years. I might babble into the ether regardless, but it’s so much more rewarding when I know people are out there, reading and commenting and sharing and just generally being interesting people who I love to interact with, whether in cyberspace or real life.

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I do believe I promised recipes to accompany my Pastry Crawl so that those of you not in Paris can enjoy along with me. With the exception of Christophe Adam, French bakers in general adhere very strictly to the rules of éclair making: e.g. If it’s a chocolate éclair, it has chocolate filling and chocolate icing. If it’s a coffee éclair, it has coffee filling and light brown, hopefully coffee-flavored icing. Rarely is it anything else. And yet, in the United States, a chocolate eclair is almost always filled with vanilla pudding (yes, pastry cream is hardly more than a fancy name for pudding (in the American sense. Don’t make me open the British pudding can of worms.)) and glazed with chocolate. So I suffer none of these compunctions, instead viewing the éclair as a canvas for whatever flavor combination strikes my fancy. On this particular occasion, inspired in part by a recent post on Not Without Salt extolling the virtues of butterscotch pudding, I chose to make my filling butterscotch.

I am admittedly out of practice piping éclairs, my muscle memory being confused between the lusty behemoths we used to make in the States and the skinnier, more uptight ones I became accustomed to making in Paris. You can see examples of both in the above photo, insert fat American joke here.

Let it be noted that the fatter an éclair is, the greater the cream-to-pastry ratio. Do with that what you will.

Somehow January is already over. But éclair month is still going (I got a bit of a late start, and then my internet was down for ten days, so I figure I can borrow a few days from February). I think at this point, a little history of the éclair is in order.

I went to the library to do my pastry research, but it turns out that the best information I found was right on my own bookshelf, in Dorie Greenspan’s lovely Around My French Table. She explains that they were invented and named by Carême. One of the first celebrity chefs, Carême gained fame in the late 18th and early 19th centuries because of his elaborate pastry creations called pièces montées. The tradition lives on today, mainly in the form of the croquembouche, still popular for French weddings and other celebrations. So it’s safe to say the guy liked his pâte à choux. Dorie writes that Carême was the fist to pipe it into “long, fingerlike shapes.”

Once the pastry was baked, he sliced the strips in half, filled them with pastry cream, and glazed their tops, creating an enduring classic, which he christened éclairs (éclair means lightning). No one’s certain why he called the slender pastries lightning…I hold with the camp convinced that the name described the way and éclair is eaten – lightning fast.

Dorie Greenspan, Around My French Table

Like most French words, éclair can be translated more than one way. I’ve always thought of it as a flash, which makes the name of éclair guru Christophe Adam’s shop a cute play on words: L’Éclair de Génie becomes “the flash of genius”. Adam, probably best known as the pastry chef who made Fauchon a destination for éclairs with his collection of imaginative takes on the classic pastry, now has his own shop which sells éclairs and truffles. I found out about it on Dorie’s delightful blog (where would I be without her?) and knew that I would have to include it in my éclair tasting. I am not disappointed.

One of the purposes of this Pastry Crawl (yes, there’s a purpose beyond eating ridiculous amounts of dessert) is to get out into this glorious city and sample treats from shops unfamiliar to me, and add to my ever-growing list of favorites. To that end, David Lebovitz’ Paris Pastry app has come in incredibly handy. Without it, I might never have learned that MOF Pâtissier Laurent Duchêne had a shop not far from my apartment, and only a couple blocks from the library where I am spending an increasing amount of time.

The shop is lovely, and I regret that I could only buy four desserts (two éclairs, two others to be revealed at a later date), because the galettes des rois looked wonderful, as did the croissants. But it was evening, and I knew it wouldn’t do the croissants justice to eat them the next morning, so I’m just going to have to get myself out of the house in the a.m. hours one of these days (I can hardly imagine how I used to get up at 5!) and grab one fresh.

I have another hope for the project as well: that by trying the same pastry at different shops, I can get an idea of each chef’s style, and an interesting cross-section of the many ways to interpret a classic. That I can continue to hone my palate, identify what makes a particular dessert great or less so, how the elements of a given pastry contribute to its ultimate success or failure, and how they can be manipulated to achieve the desired effect. So, you know, I’m not just stuffing my face. It’s for science.

All this is to say that not every pastry is going to be a winner. It’s statistically impossible. There are loads of really bad bakeries out there, even in Paris (maybe especially in Paris, given that there are so many of them here, which is why a good guidebook or app is so important) and I can usually spot them with a simple glance at the case. If the éclairs are topped with dull, ugly fondant, that’s strike one. If the tarts look old, with the filling cracking or pulling away from the crust, that’s strike two. If they’re selling Chupa Chups or Kinder Buenos – there’s a TV ad that infuriates me, where Tony Parker and some lady walk into a bakery, and then they start fighting over the last Kinder Bueno despite the fact that there is a case full of supposedly fresh, handmade sweets and they want the stupid packaged thing… What was I talking about again? Oh, yes, huge pastries are also generally a bad sign. But I think I’m getting off track here.

So as I was saying, I picked up two éclairs at Laurent Dubois’ shop, chocolate and vanilla. I was disappointed to note that the chocolate and coffee éclairs were glazed in fondant, but pleased to see that the vanilla one was not.

You don’t actually see vanilla éclairs that often, which is one reason I chose it. And I always approve of an éclair that isn’t covered in fondant. The sugar cookie baked into the top of this one gave it a pleasant slight crunch – a nice textural contrast to the smooth pastry cream inside.

I was a bit discouraged to note the lack of vanilla bean in the custard, but overall, this éclair was fine. Nothing more, nothing less.

The chocolate éclair turned out to be a near-perfect example of the typically shoddy work done by apprentices. (Éclairs, being classic and relatively simple to prepare, often fall to the apprentices. It is supposed to teach them some basic skills used in the pâtisserie, such as using a piping bag, how to tell when the fondant is the right temperature, and tasting to see if the cream has enough chocolate/coffee/etc. flavor.) The kid who filled this one didn’t do it carefully enough, and I got a bite with no filling in it!

Also, the fondant. (Maybe I should take a short aside here and explain that here I am talking about poured fondant, which is used to glaze éclairs, millefeuilles, petits fours, and things like that. Not to be confused with rolled fondant, which is what they use to give wedding cakes that smooth finish. I’m not really a fan of that stuff either, but that’s another post.) I know from experience that this stuff is not easy to work with. Glazing éclairs with fondant is one of my very least favorite things to do, because if the fondant is too cold or thick it won’t coat properly, but if you get it too hot it will be dull when it cools and in the meantime it will run everywhere and in either case your fingers get really sticky and after the first few nice, pretty, clean éclairs you either have to stop and wash your hands or keep going, knowing that the edges are getting increasingly sloppy and smeared. Like this:

Those faults aside, the choux pastry was reasonably good, and I liked the chocolate pastry cream. Although the prices were relatively low – around 3 euros apiece, or a little over half the price of an éclair from Fauchon or La Pâtisserie des Rêves – I probably won’t be back to Laurent Duchêne for the éclairs. I still want to try that croissant, though.

And with nearly three-quarters of the vote, Paris Pastry Crawl is the undisputed winner! Thank you all for voting, and now, let the gluttony commence. We’re going to start off the series with the éclair, quite possibly the most iconic of all French pastries, and certainly the first I was familiar with, thanks to a francophile mother and the Beaverton Bakery (hey! they’re still around!), where she used to take me and my brother after school for a treat if we’d been good… or maybe if she had a hankering herself. Now, of course, I live in Paris, and finding an éclair doesn’t require a special trip, though sometimes it should.

La Pâtisserie des Rêves has been around for a few years now, but I admit I didn’t feel all that compelled to go. Something about the bell jars covering the pastries on display just seemed so clinical. Impersonal. Sterile. But just before Christmas, chef Philippe Conticini put out a gorgeous book (with an irresistible puffy cover). Onto my Amazon wishlist it went, and what do you know? Santa Claus deemed that I had been a good girl. Flipping through the pages, I realized that these pastries weren’t sterile at all. The swoop of toasted meringue on the lemon tart, the overgrown rolled brioche, the opulent use of vanilla beans – this is the way I like to bake! Obviously, a visit was now in order.

I can’t imagine what my life in Paris would be like without this blog. Not only do I owe the majority of my friendships (apart from Nick’s colleagues, that is) to it, but it’s also been responsible for getting me out into the city, trying new places and dishes, a handful of professional contacts, and even the very apartment I live in. So it’s sad how neglectful I’ve been of this space in the past year, and I’m starting 2013 with the determination to give it the care and attention it deserves.

This was but one topic of discussion with my friend Ann (we met through our blogs and bonded over a shared love of xiaolongbao) as we sipped tea and snacked on pastries in the colorful salon de thé at Colorova (which I learned about on my friend Lindsey’s blog).

The pastries, like the room itself, are stylish and artful. We sampled a tart with speculoos, peanut mousse, and caramel and a “cube” of chocolate cake layered with ganache and passionfruit cream. In the case of the latter, its beauty surpassed its deliciousness – I think both the chocolate and passionfruit flavors lacked intensity, a fault that maybe as simple to remedy as adding a pinch of salt. I was smitten with the tart, but Ann wondered what it might be like with a different nut. Of course, she’s been in the States for the last few months, so maybe she’s not as easily swayed by peanut-flavored things as I am, given that they’re still kind of a novelty in France.

At some point in our conversation, Ann reminded me that I used to have various projects for Croque-Camille, like when I spent each month in 2009 delving into a different regional cuisine of France. Not only are things like that fun for readers, but I learn from doing them as well. And it also acts as something of an instant content generator for the blog. Don’t know what to write about? Well, what’s this month’s project? Much less writer’s block.

So I’m starting a new project. This year, I will dedicate each month to a different French pastry. I’ll taste examples of said pastry at several pâtisseries around town, learn about the history of it, and give recipe pointers so that you, readers from all across the globe, can bake and eat along with me. Sound like fun? I think so. But I do need your help with one little detail: